Men in Miami Hotels (10 page)

Cot looks at Marcella. She smiles like somebody with nothing else to offer. He smiles back, but he can feel the skin of his face tight as if it won’t go along. She told him once that he had the face and body of a squat man who got stretched. He’s taking the plane down. The engine keeps running, whacking and kicking a little. He knows to keep the nose up. Then they’re right over the water. The country looks deserted off to the right. A few tall native palms stick up out of scrub, a few big trees front a shallow bay below a beach and a large, listing, empty-windowed house. They’re a hundred yards out. The plane seems to be settling, drifting down, time inside the cabin holding back, expanding into an apartness and stasis that seems filled with a quiet movement of some other section of him, even as he watches the water, black as pitch, stained by roots, rush along beneath them.

Then they hit and then they are skiing across the flats. He pulled up with one hand on the wheel and one on the yoke just as they hit. He presses back in his seat hard and he can see Marcella out of the corner of his eye pressing back too. He can hear Jackie moaning. The plane continues in a straight line, slowing as it goes, and then, without his hands moving the wheel, turns slowly all the way around so they are facing the stretch of ocean already passed through, and comes back to itself, and stops. They rock like a baby in the waters.

An instant of faintness gives way to exhilaration. He yells. Marcella leans over and presses her face into his chest. His mother bangs on the back of his seat; he can’t tell at first whether in anger or relief. It’s relief. He leans forward and presses his head against the dash.
Half saved,
maybe more than half
. On a re-dump into the deep—the shallows, little numbers in his head spinning by as he thinks this, rushing over cliffs and plunging into the dark, numbers of the dead he knows them as.

Passing it along through the shallows they’re able to hand-walk the plane in to shore, to a little hump-backed leafy island with a broken-down house on it.

5

S
pane drove back from Channel Haven Gardens where through his big Nikon Monarchs he’d watched transient birds just returned to the trees—redstarts and warblers, even an oriole—and had lunch at Sappy’s with Albertson who was trying to pin back a waitress’s ears with complicated repartee when he walked in. Albertson was scary and he was tall and massive like Spane, but he was no good at repartee; he was too concentrated. The waitress as she veered toward the kitchen was laughing at him, something Spane hoped Albertson didn’t notice. “So where is he?”

“Trying to scrap his way out of the Keys.”

“Shit. I’d a’been in California by now.”

“Not Cot. He always thinks he can fix things.”

Albertson laughed his croaky, sharp-witted laugh. “For a smart boy, he’s awfully stupid.”

“Persistent though.”

Albertson had a big shovel face and sharp black eyes placed a little too close together like an athlete’s. Spane was thinking about Cot. He’d started on the run finally. But there was no telling what he was really up to. Spane ordered a drink and talked with Albertson about the shipments coming in over on the west side of the Everglades. It was spring outside, a remarkably subtle and unconvincing season in Miami. He wanted to take another walk in the gardens and look at the little buds of frangipani and court St. Susan flowers just coming out, maybe drive down to the Everglades and sit in the car looking at the grass prairies that always made him think of Africa. This girl—this woman who’d left him sorted and frazzled, bit down to the quick—he would think about her too and about what he could do. Albertson droned on about business and then the food came and they ate and Albertson tried again with the waitress but she told him she would call the manager if he didn’t shut up.

“Something’s wrong with me,” Albertson said.

“What do you mean?”

“My groin. I got some kind of growth.”

“Like a tumor.”

“Probably not only like.”

“I hear these days they have robots can cut those things out in two seconds.”

“That’s as terrifying as a tumor.”

“What you doing eating a steak?”

“I don’t want to give in.”

“I understand that.”

“Where the hell is Sims?”

“We got the eyes on him.”

“Bug eyes? Fish eyes?”

“Mortal eyes.”

Last week he’d tried to explain to this woman about how he loved the flowers in the gardens around the city, about how the big gobs of orange blossoms popping out in the poincianas looked like the flower cloaks of Aztec kings thrown up into the trees, about bloodflowers and tickseed, sea daisies all coming into bloom on the dunes, but she wasn’t interested. “I came up here to get away from flowers,” she said.

On the way to Spane’s hotel she said she’d decided to start making other plans.

“About us,” Spane said in his dry voice.

She didn’t answer.

“That’s the end of this then,” Spane said. Secretly he called her Ceci—his favorite name for a woman—and he almost called her Ceci now.

“I didn’t say that,” she said.

“I don’t know any other way to take it.” But he didn’t believe her. It was a quirk with her, such declarations, a stabilizer that cut the nervousness. She wasn’t going anywhere.

On Dixie Highway traffic was backed up, so he took another route, dodging in among the neighborhoods around Kendall. A guy was selling shrimp from a sky-blue van, and Spane stopped to get a couple of pounds. Pink sweet-smelling shrimp the man shoveled into a plastic Walgreen’s bag. He recognized Spane and asked him for a tip on the horses.

“If I could give you something like that I wouldn’t be buying shrimp out of a truck.”

“These shrimp you would,” the man said. He had salt marks on his forehead and spoke with a slight Jamaican accent.

“Ceci” sat in the car working on some papers. She looked like a dark-haired, specious, aging princess, but she was a workhorse and sharp as a whip, and she was disappointed that somebody as smart as Spane had become such a dud. She was tired of herself and tired of vegetation and maybe even of life, and she didn’t yet know what to do about it. Maybe Spane could tell her back at the hotel where he lived in a suite overlooking Government Cut. She liked being up high in hotels. It made her think that the world had opportunities she’d never considered, fresh approaches like the big cloud reefs piling up in the west. She dreamed all the time of a new life. It was the kind of dream you could put anything into: love, children, wrestling matches on late drunken midnights, kisses like flower petals falling from a tamarind tree, friendly usages, complicated plans taking years to come to fruition, the smell of rain on a sunny beach. In any version of it she would hate to be called Ceci.

Albertson looked Spane straight in the eye. The look was like a bar of black steel connecting them. Neither of them had to say a thing.

I
t was late afternoon and they were still on the island. The old wooden house, half fallen in, stood among pines back from the little wrinkled beach. Scarred level patches, places where hunters built fires, railroad vines stretched out to their skinny full length dotted with blue blossoms, excavation holes, stacked moldy boards. A place of history maybe that you would have to be local to know about. The gray sand beach ran up into grass, then scabby pines and a couple of tall cabbage palms, then the house facing the cut, then the heavy bristle of the Everglades. The house’s front galleries, top and bottom, were intact, as were the front rooms on both sides of the door, but the back had been torn off, a single bite for the right hurricane. Visitors had built fires and part of one of the rooms was burned. They set their belongings on the porch and Ella went off walking around the property. His mother was good at outdoor business, business Cot had never learned very well. His ambition, he had told her when he was eight, was to be a city boy, discrete, he meant, solitary on a street corner, unknown by the populace. The back of the house looked into myrtle scrub that a few twisted poisonwood and caper trees poked up out of and a few senna bushes too, bent down with brushy flowers. Old outbuildings now mostly bits and haphazard piles of sandy sticks were knocked back against the bushes.

Ella returned after a while with a couple of papayas big as dopp kits. She gave him one of her offhanded smiles he could see the weariness in. He was impatient with her, as he’d often been as a child, such old times were back, for a moment. He put his hand on her arm and as she folded around, hugged her. She hardly hugged him back, and that was familiar too, both of them disjunct and shy, waiting for some indecipherable impossibility to relent. Suddenly ashamed he grabbed Marcella who was walking by, aloof, spying maybe. She swung around in an old cartoon skidding and leveling way she had, smiling at him, and attacked him with a hug. For a moment he clung to both women at once; it was like a picture, in life and in his mind, a gallantry, a needfulness that was both aggrandizing and humbling. The women broke away, separately, looking as if they didn’t know each other. Marcella stayed closer. “I got to . . . ,” she said and threw up a smile that was tinged with regret or something like it, fatigue maybe, this strange askew way of her lately. He thought he understood. “My phone . . .”

His was still back in KW, but Marcella had one. She hadn’t been able to get a signal over the water and the one she got now—stepping back from him to make a call as if he might interfere with reception—was weak—
calling who?
he wondered—but he took the device from her and got through like a charm to Tommy in his room at the Orange Blossom in the Grove. When he answered Cot abruptly didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t ask for retrieval. He listened to Tommy’s voice speaking from the barrel of distance asking what he wanted. “Come get us,” he wanted to say anyhow. He wanted to go on in his ordinary rapid-fire way throwing out ideas and pointers, laying down a handline of talk, but he didn’t have a turn now. Tommy, in a few chopped sentences let him know what was up: there was no longer anybody he could trust in Miami, including him. He broke off the call.

“We got to bury Jimmy,” Cot said.

T
hey had an argument about that. They had walked the plane around through the shallow water to the stobs where the old pier had been and tied it up, but they’d left Jimmy propped in the seat.

“They won’t like it back in town,” Marcella said, meaning Key West, meaning culture and life, and his mother agreed.

“We can’t just leave him lying out.”

“Someone’ll probably be by here soon,” Marcella said.

They agreed to leave him in the plane overnight but then Cot thought that would be a bad idea, and he talked them into getting him out. He and Jackie carried the body up onto the porch and wrapped it with one of the crinkly silver blankets in the plane’s emergency kit. Near dark they saw a boat far out in the bay and tried to hail it, but the boat didn’t stop. The twilight filled in around them. They sat by a fire built in a three-sided brick fireplace out in the front yard. Supper was the sandwiches Ella had prepared, onion and chicken, and banana with mayonnaise. Jackie wanted to sing songs and they did that. They had only a couple of six-liter bladders of water from the plane, but there was a catchment in back of the house. Cot walked with Marcella along the shore. The beach wasn’t wide and gave way to mangrove scrub and bushes before they could go far. Lines of trickley vine ran down from the grass. A little brown-backed plover skipped along the waterline and was gone, headed for the roost. After a while Marcella asked what he was going to do.

“Deliver you to Aunt Mayrene’s in Fort Myers, I guess.”

“As soon as we get up to town we’ll be all right,” she said rubbing her arms.

“I don’t mean you need me to haul you. But I’m nervous about who might be lurking between here and Mayrene’s.”

“You’re always nervous.”

“I know about these things, matters, frolicsome killers, you know, all that.” The words like used-up chewing gum he was hooking out of his mouth.

“Your kidnapper buddy said they were going to make you say where those jewels are.”

“Rollins—Jeez.” He looked sideways at her. “I’d tell ’em in a flash if I knew.” He wanted to say that won’t be the end of it, but he didn’t, the words in his head poised to take on weight if issued to the air.

“I’m not going to criticize you.”

“That’ll be a first.”

She swayed against him, cocked her head to look at him, looking barely up; she wasn’t a lot shorter than he was. “You used to have freckles on your face, but now you don’t have any.”

Standing before the slithering quiet surf they kissed, not deeply. Little blinks and cohorts of darkness, of something that promised an endless supply, skipped and went on by. They sat down on the sand. There were lights far out in the Gulf—shrimpers probably. “At night,” he said, remembering something his father told him, “when it’s really dark—”

And then he forgot what it was and stalled in the gathered dark. He thought of himself in that moment as simply waiting, but there was something else.

“What?” she said. Her voice was changed in some way. A hollowness, a new channel cut down into her heart through which came sounds and alarms almost too faint to hear.

“I don’t get you,” he said.

“Get what?”

“You.”

“I’m glad you finally admit it.”

Even her face, oblong of un-sun-changed whiteness in the edging-away twilight, like some apparitional aspect revealed now, as if she had all along been a ghost. He looked away, not wanting to see.

“You already know everything,” she said.

“About what?”

“About me.”

This too was contrary.

She leaned over and spit in the sand. “You’re still getting up in the middle of the night, aren’t you?”

“I ever was.” Since he was a child he’d waked restless in the dark, wanting to get into things.

A nightbird called, maybe a chuck-will’s-widow, checking something that’d stuck in its mind, the cry slipped like a note under dark’s door. The moon this night had come up while it was still light. Now it westered out over the Gulf, leaving a splashed-in trail to follow if you were fool enough. He figured everybody at one time or another wished he was.

She got up and stepped away from him, listing, edging, sidling, and straying, her head up as if sniffing a scent on the breeze, like somebody trying to disappear before they got out of sight. He watched her go. Each footprint laid in sand was sculpted, a faint chinked line. She sang under her breath, something personal, only for herself. Across the channel the mainland, the sprawled and tangled swamp, was as black as absence itself. It chittered and rustled, setting itself up for night work. Then a scuttling, thrashing sound from bushes across the strip of water only as wide as a country road. Then something else—the cry of an animal, unfamiliar and scary, a scream, set in opposition, whining, thin at first. They both knew what it was: a panther, letting loose a complaint that slithered and coarsened as it came, breaking into a scream that was almost a howl. It was a noise set against the weave and busyness of the swamp. It stopped them both, stopped hearts everywhere nearby probably, stopped breath, stopped everything but the faint undersound of breeze. It was a fresh take on things. He could feel his blood draw up.

She could feel hers too that had already shivered.
There’s nothing to do about it now.
The thought came to her fully formed, like a new law. She swayed and would’ve fallen, but a breeze, the same old one, caught her—so it seemed—and held her, just enough for her to catch her balance. She saw again how thin he’d become, tightly and muscularly composed, but pared down, hardly, even now, looking to be much more than a boy. She had noticed the lines in his face, the harrying.

Small waves, fresh born, chipped at clearings, soughed in the mangrove banks. “Cot,” she said under her breath. “You don’t know, Cot.” The panther—it could be
her
screaming out in the dark. She said his name again, softly; and again: she wanted to see how long it took him to hear her. But he was looking straight at her. He had caught her right off.